Abstract
The ideal of an “authoritative text” is no longer a taken-for-granted assumption among editorial and critical theorists of the literary text. Rather, texts are, and should be thought of as, composites of distributed activities of multiple social agents. This view has many virtues, but it quickly runs up against the deeply entrenched gestaltism of the “underlying work” stance, a perspective that invades some of the most commonplace ways of talking about Anglo-American literary texts. We explain the fundamental tensions that arise from this stance and offer a general ontology of literary artifacts that can account for the ways we habitually conceptualize texts and their effects. We provide a basic cognitive framework for understanding the ontology of the document, in its most generalized form, which can embrace a wide range of practices, literary and otherwise, that have significant implications for understanding editorial, authorial, and readerly behavior.
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©2017 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Passing-by “Ça va?” checks in clinic corridors
- Globalization and its determinative influence upon the humanities: A semiotic/hermeneutic diagnosis
- Gendering the nation: A case study on the postage stamps of Cyprus
- Clues as information, the semiotic gap, and inferential investigative processes, or making a (very small) contribution to the new discipline, Forensic Semiotics
- What we talk about when we talk about texts: Identity compressions and the ontology of the “work”
- We like to talk about smell: A worldly take on language, sensory experience, and the Internet
- Mapping our underlying cognitions and emotions about good environmental behavior: Why we fail to act despite the best of intentions
- Naive geography and geopolitical semiotics: The semiotic analysis of geomental maps of Russians
- The Transformations of Abduction: From the Inferential Model to the Logic of Relatives
- The “unknown voice” in Western history since Socrates
- Semiotic study for the analysis of communications within organizations: Theoretical approach from organizational semiotics
- Semiotics of ideocriticism: Four strategies of modeling
- Spectatorship as a play on moral ambiguities: Neuro-evolutionary semiotic approach to lowly arousal emotions
- Comparing the semiotic construction of attitudinal meanings in the multimodal manuscript, original published and adapted versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- Semiotic modeling and education
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Passing-by “Ça va?” checks in clinic corridors
- Globalization and its determinative influence upon the humanities: A semiotic/hermeneutic diagnosis
- Gendering the nation: A case study on the postage stamps of Cyprus
- Clues as information, the semiotic gap, and inferential investigative processes, or making a (very small) contribution to the new discipline, Forensic Semiotics
- What we talk about when we talk about texts: Identity compressions and the ontology of the “work”
- We like to talk about smell: A worldly take on language, sensory experience, and the Internet
- Mapping our underlying cognitions and emotions about good environmental behavior: Why we fail to act despite the best of intentions
- Naive geography and geopolitical semiotics: The semiotic analysis of geomental maps of Russians
- The Transformations of Abduction: From the Inferential Model to the Logic of Relatives
- The “unknown voice” in Western history since Socrates
- Semiotic study for the analysis of communications within organizations: Theoretical approach from organizational semiotics
- Semiotics of ideocriticism: Four strategies of modeling
- Spectatorship as a play on moral ambiguities: Neuro-evolutionary semiotic approach to lowly arousal emotions
- Comparing the semiotic construction of attitudinal meanings in the multimodal manuscript, original published and adapted versions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- Semiotic modeling and education